User Centered Design: How to please users and get the CEO off your back

1. User Centered Design:
How to please users and get the CEO off your back
Dan Arra
San Mateo, CA
650-218-4444
darra@macadamian.com

2. “Selective Attention Test”, by Daniel Simons
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3. Agenda
 User Centered Design (UCD) Overview
 It’s a process… but negotiation is important
 Support your choices with data
 Storytelling is complementary and effective
 Differentiate your product
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4. Demystify UCD – Activities & Deliverables
 Users
 Who are they? What do they care about?
 How do they actually interact with your product?
 How would they interact with a new version/feature?
 Centered on value to actual users
 Product Strategy Workshop
 Key business objectives
 User requirements
 Design to illustrate value to users
 Design, test, incorporate feedback
 Rinse and repeat
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5. Demystify UCD – Activities & Deliverables
 Users
 Personas – context, context, context
 Centered on value to actual users
 Usage Scenarios
 Your business objectives… their value
 Still gotta have documented requirements
 Design to illustrate value to users
 Wireframes, models, mockups
 Visual concepts
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6. Demystify UCD
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7. Demystify UCD
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8. Support your choices with data (and process)
 Gain agreement thru metrics
 Simplify your decisions
 Justify your choices
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9. Gain agreement thru metrics
 Define objective measurable targets
 Express from the customer’s/user’s perspective
 Both qualitative AND quantitative are good
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10. Simplify your decisions
 With success metrics in hand…
 Obtained from actual users…
 You have confidence about what to include…
 And what to remove
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11. Justify your choices ( aka defend yourself)
 Charts, data – “During our first round of testing…
 time on task was x seconds”
 # of errors was reduced by y%
 Narratives – “We watched the users actually smile
and relax when then completed this task”
 Storyboards – “As you can see from this diagram,
the new path to the reservation screen is…”
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12. Gain agreement thru metrics
 Organizational Confidence
 Success is often a matter of confidence
 If Sales believes in the product (based on metrics),
they will do a better job selling it.
 If Management trusts you’ve made the right
decisions, you’ll get the resources you need
 If Support understands the training issues, they’ll
be more effective
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13. Differentiate your product
Features are important IF they are valuable to users
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14. Identify Goals & Tasks
 Users don’t approach with a feature in mind –
think goals and tasks
 More isn’t always better. More often leads to:
 Clutter
 Bloat
 Complicated
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15. Differentiate based on those goals & tasks
 Feature war  Bad User Experience
 Study real behavior – needs, goals, workflow,
workplace processes through:
 Direct observation of users
 Feedback from users
 Organize tasks, sub-tasks by:
 Order of importance
 Frequency performed
 Map relationships & dependencies between tasks:
 Flowcharts
 Mapping diagrams
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16. Information architecture & task relationships diagrams
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17. Differentiate your product and sell more of it
 If it looks good, you will get more interest
 It’s a process
 Good design can be measured
 Removes opinion and conjecture
 Requires expertise to test (“Blink”, by Malcolm
Gladwell – puppies, kitties and Aeron Chair)
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18. Who is Macadamian?
 Software Products Consultancy
 When the user experience is key
 Full scope of software development life cycle
• UX Design & User Research
• Software Engineering
• QA Testing
 Increasing customer adoption
 14 Year Track Record, over 150 staff
 Hybrid Onshore/Offshore - Ottawa(HQ), Romania, Armenia
 Experience across multiple markets and products
 Wide range of skills and processes:
• UX design + Software Engineering + Test/QA
• Desktop (Win, Mac OS)
• Mobile (iPhone/iPad, Blackberry, Android, WP7)
• SaaS (.NET, LAMP, J2EE, RIA, Flash/Flex)
• Strobe/Sproutcore Partner
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19. What have we done… lately?
 New Product Development, Extensions, Re-designs
 Mobile client development – iPad, iPhone, Android phone & tablet
 Web development – Web 2.0 apps with mobile “companion” products
 Desktop Clients – Windows and Mac
 User Experience Design & Usability Testing
 Product Families – Desktop, Web, Mobile Clients
 User Research including
• Usability “walk-throughs”
• Usability Testing
• Ethnographic research or “job shadowing”
 Examples
 Cisco – FlipShare Mobile, Umi home telepresence
 Juniper – Re-design of existing app to include web, mobile, desktop
 BitTorrent – Macintosh client & Android Tablet (both design & build)
 Varian Medical – Electronic Medical Record for iPad
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20. Our sweet spot…
 End-to-end: from napkin sketch to release (and anywhere
along your software development life cycle)
 Creativity: innovating in design and technology
 User Research: Validate user needs, usability, market, etc.
 Uncharted territory: dealing with technical uncertainty &
potential for change
 Intense deadlines – need for rapid response times
 Experience required – there’s no time for ramp-up
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